2015/06/30 by Misha Teplitskiy, Grace Lu, Eamon Duede · 112 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Altmetrics #Computer science #Field (mathematics) #Impact factor #Law #Library science #MEDLINE #Odds #Open Source Software Innovations #Open science #Political science #Publishing #Scholarly communication #Scopus #Statistics #Test (biology) #Value (mathematics) #Wikis in Education and Collaboration #World Wide Web #cs.DL #cs.SI #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/asi.23687
published in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 68(9), 2116-2127 (Wiley) · An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Wikipedia Workshop at 9th International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM), Oxford, UK, Forthcoming in: Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2015
arxiv created 2016/06/03 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex publication_date 2016/10/13 · arxiv updated 2017/01/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
With the rise of Wikipedia as a first-stop source for scientific knowledge, it is important to compare its representation of that knowledge to that of the academic literature. Here we identify the 250 most heavily used journals in each of 26 research fields (4,721 journals, 19.4M articles in total) indexed by the Scopus database, and test whether topic, academic status, and accessibility make articles from these journals more or less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia. We find that a journal's academic status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both strongly increase the probability of it being referenced on Wikipedia. Controlling for field and impact factor, the odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to paywall journals. One of the implications of this study is that a major consequence of open access policies is to significantly amplify the diffusion of science, through an intermediary like Wikipedia, to a broad audience.